ALBUM REVIEW: The Doomed Bird Of Providence – Meteoric Heralds Of Danger

10 To 1

Released: 20.03.26

This is the fifth album from Mark Kluzek’s endlessly fascinating and rewarding Doomed Bird Of Providence project, and like 2017’s gorgeous Burrowed Into The Soft Sky it’s an instrumental record. As well as some regular Doomed Bird personnel, this new album also shares an approach to its composition and recording: complex graphical scores are used as prompts to improvise from, symbols and concentric circles suggesting chord changes, shifting dynamics or melodies.

But don’t get the impression this is some drily academic venture: the music here is full-blooded, rousing, intense and often very beautiful. Each main track is preceded by a shorter companion piece, serving as a palate cleanser or prologue. Darkly Rolling Waves Flashed Fire is a quick-step dance piece, the strings circling each other over a skittering drum pattern. A Long Low Line on the Distant Horizon is a melodica-driven sea shanty at first, slowly morphing into something more Parisian somehow. The title track is propelled by a brooding bass line, building into something powerful and perhaps the most ‘rock’ thing on the album, clanging and threatening – as with their other releases, most of the music here is at roughly folk-adjacent (in a previous Doomed Bird review I made some glib comparison to a folky Godspeed You! Black Emperor, and that still holds, especially on this track). Closer Towering Above the Wreck could also warrant a ‘folky Godspeed’ label, the way the strings soar above the rhythm section.

Like previous Doomed Bird albums, Meteoric Heralds of Danger takes a book as its jumping off point (in this case, 1874’s For The Term Of His Natural by Marcus Clarke, an Australian novel about a convict with a strong nautical theme). The resulting music that Kluzek creates with his wonderful, rotating cast of musicians, is singular, cinematic and drenched in atmosphere. This is marvellous, affecting stuff and it deserves a wider audience.